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  • How Idea Marketplaces work

    Ideas are hard to define, and more to buy and sell, so an Idea Marketplace is a tough challenge.
    The globalized world is extremely open to idea flow, to dismay of a few dictatorial governments. But flow is not necessarily trade, and quantity does not imply quality. A good idea marketplace should have a way to tell the golden ideas from the sand, and deliver them to those who can appreciate them and turn them into profit.

    A well-deviced but unsuccessful approach to the Idea Market

    Around 2000 there was Ideaexchange.com, where ideas could be bought and sold. The ideas had a short public description, and a longer hidden explanation. If you paid the price, you would access the whole thing. Idea authors charged for their complete ideas and the website collected a percentage.  Buyers could call for an idea on a certain topic and also comment on the ideas they bought for others to join or beware.

    To my deception the website did not last. I do not know why, because in my opinion it was a hell of an idea. Possible failure explanations: Ideaexchange.com did not have a mechanism to convert ideas into projects. The fact that idea posters had to pay a small fee beforehand probably prevented them to reach critical mass. Also, the ideas were too wide (proposals together with jokes, gossip and varied information).

    The word “idea” has many meanings, and the marketplaces should limit itselves to measurable ideas, and to ideas that can have any useful follow-up or consequence.

    Idea Futures

    There is also the concept of Idea Futures, which implies prediction power about the truth of an idea. A nice website called Ideosphere tries to predict events using the reputation of the predictors. Those who earn points predicting accurately are more credible at predicting new issues. The site covers future facts or hidden facts, like science issues.

    So, this site deals about Future and Hidden Facts, not just “ideas”. Predictions often deal with the stock market or sports results, and those activities are heavily regulated, which limits this peculiar subset of the idea marketplaces.

    Got an idea? We will invest on it!

    There are several inventor-investor matching sites, where business ideas can develop into projects. However, most of them are inefficient, with worthless ideas and false investors. Worthless ideas rank from perpetual movement to cold fusion in the kitchen, with better mousetraps in the middle. False investors include those who require a “fee” to analyze the idea and then disappear, and those who are willing to invest up to 10 dollars in your idea, plus those who demand the inventor to fill a 100 page form before anything, with no assurance that even the title will be read.

    I have seen them all and I recognize that good matching requires many right properties on each part: financial, geographical, language, age. Also, like in romantic matching, there are many hard-to-define human qualities.

    Regulating the entry of both parts (good inventors – real investors) would be an assurance of quality for these idea marketplaces, but that requires time and money. It is hard to find someone able to predict which idea will fly and which will not take off. Who could that be? An academic? A successful businessman? A psychic? Probably none of them. Most likely, a committee with the three of them.

    The Web 2.0 is about filtering trash

    The Web 1.0 had many data covering the valuable information. Search engines still post: “Results 1 – 100 of about 7,190,000 pages”. 95% of all email is spam.

    The news aggregator systems like Digg.com, Reddit.com and Meneame.net (Spanish) became recently very successful as typical Web 2.0 mechanisms. They use qualified voting, social networks and automated quality rating for entries, usually news.

    You probably are reading this article because you found it on Digg.com or similar aggregator.

    Aggregators as idea marketplaces

    Are News Aggregators feasible idea marketplaces? Can you post an idea and see if it catches on? I assume you can .

    Business ideas can be filtered by the News Aggregator public and that could be a predictor of its future acceptance by the general public. If the idea is accepted by the masses, savvy investors will be able to catch them.

    Political ideas can also have a similar mechanism. Anyone could launch a proposal and the politicians fishing for good ideas could profit from it. Conversely, someone who reaches Top-Digg user status (good Karma in the pligg-like systems) can become a good real-life politician.
     
    Empty domain names are like business proposals, and are also subject to Aggregator treatment. Such Aggregator could be the ideal automated domain valuation system.

    Aggregators could be used for painters to test their sketches, for advertisers to test their logos or catchy phrases, for models-to-be to expose their beauties, or for conferences looking for appealing speakers. The Barcamp geeky Web 2.0 conferences use such a system.

    There are a few necessary conditions for an aggregator to be successful: good coding, critical mass and some of the features described above in IdeaExchange and Ideosphere.

    I have material for one aggregator on business ideas, and other for local politics ideas.

  • Business Ideas Aggregator: vote the best

    We tried an idea aggregator with Digg technology, for ranking the ideas according to the number of votes from the users. Its purpose is to select the ideas that are best according to their popularity. It can also be done with WordPress plugins.

    Sometimes the idea is theoretically good, but does not work in the real world. Why? Nobody knows. Probably a marketing issue, or the way people perceive it. On the other hand, some ideas go to the top in spite of being lame quality. Just turn on the TV and judge: the more popular shows are often bad quality, but they have something that appealed the audience.

    So, this Business Idea Aggregator will help us pick up the best received idea. After that, it will be easier to obtain funding to carry it out.

    At this point, most of the published ideas are mine (Sergio’s). This means that you will find an heterogeneous and unpredictable mix of crazy, far fledged, long shot, plain stupid, sensible and Net-oriented projects.

    The site is open to anyone who wants to publish, vote or comment on the projects.

    The ideas are published in an ebook, located at https://domaingrower.com/ebook

  • Integral Domain Development Service

    We are launching an integral service for Domain Development. It is a standard Web Design and Web Promotion campaign, including:

    • Domain
    • Hosting
    • Design
    • Optimized WordPress blog with all the SEO plugins
    • 20 weekly postings with original content (modified by me, from the web)
    • Submission to search engines and directories
    • Guarranteed Top Ten position for some (uncommon) keyword or money back

    You will see it advertised as:

    INVEST IN VIRTUAL REAL ESTATE, THE 2008 GOLD RUSHSECURE A TOP RANKING IN THE SEARCH ENGINES

    DOMAINS ARE MORE VALUABLE AS THEY ARE LONGER ALIVE

    It can be used for:

    • Personal Marketing –> get a blog to promote yourself as an employee, consultant, politician or whatever.
    • Idea Marketing
    • Regional Real Estate Marketing –> for Real Estate companies that already have an institutional website, but desire to strengthen their position in a specific region.
    • Small Business Marketing
    • Individual Product Marketing –> for large companies that already have an institutional website, but desire to build traffic on a single product.
    • Niche Marketing

    By the way, look in Google for Domain Development Service , and this DomainGrower.com site is 1st among 12,400,000.

    Prices can divided into 3 ranges:

    • Standard 300-400 U$D
    • Intense 600-800
    • Full Effort 1900-2500

    Ask us about it!

  • Site-specific stop words in Google: what they tell us about the indexation quality

    This is the 4th article in the Googleometry Project Series.

    Saturation is usually defined as the number of indexed pages in a website. However, supplemental results can be a significant part of the indexed pages, with no ranking value whatsoever. So, a deeper analysis of saturation and indexed pages is needed.

    We define 3 kinds of poorly indexed pages:

    – Foreign Pages: pages not assigned to any known language, so it show only if the searcher uses “all the Web” in the Language Preferences.

    – Pages non associated to keywords: the only appear in the listings when you request site:domain.com, but they have no keywords associated with them. So, they are useless.

    – Pages in the Reduced Indexation Set. Those pages are shown when a Stop Word appears in the search query. This indexation is probably limited to the page Title alone.
    We researched the effect of combined searches such as:

    site:domain.com keyword1 OR keyword2

    Experiments were performed along several days, but data sets need to be obtained in the same day, because there is some day-to-day variation.

    We found these consistent indicators of website indexation quality:

    – number of pages within English filtered pages, versus pages for all the Web. This setting is modified in the Preferences section of Google. Google not only supplies English pages, but also quality-filtered pages. Most pages in any Web search are discarded in the English-only search, although they are in perfect English. These works equally for Spanish or French pages.

    For some reason, the English searches tend to place the Supplemental results inside a link, the well known: “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries….”, while the Web searches directly add the Supplementals at the end of the regular organic results. 

    Stop Words are specific for each site.

    Ask us for specific experiments that you want us to run…

  • Life imitates Digg

    Ideas have a complex, little-known dynamics. As humans do, they are born, grow, reproduce and die. In the struggle to survive they fiercely fight other ideas. Being slim, original, useful and fertile are good attributes for them, while complexity, similarity to others and poor expression are forces that keep ideas in the obscurity.

    We idea-marketers are in charge of dressing-up ideas and send them thru the appropriate channels into the battlefield. Digg.com is one of the preferred channels, because of the wide exposure for winners. In addition to sending my fighters to Digg, I optimize them for Google and Yahoo. In the Web business that activity is known as SEO, search engine optimizing. To advance the comparison, getting a good position in the search engines is like a long tournament between 2 knights, where horse, armour and other weaponry play a heavy role. Digg is  more like box: only pure idea strength leads to victory, in no more than one hour.

    Speed is critical in our times. Today, the 100 Year War would be a 100 Minute War.  A Digg posting titled “Let’s Declare War on Britain (or France, or Iran)”, will soon get a couple of diggs with several buries, and that would be the end of it. A huge bullet saving.

    It happens that many ideas in Real Life, as in Digg, are faced more often with indifference than with opposition. If my boxer is good but unknown, he will probably never reach Madison Square Garden. On the other hand, a John Doe pushed by Don King will get immediate exposure.

    Digg has the “celebrity effect” built into his algorithm, privileging the known, successful coaches. Once you are famous, you blow your nose and you are in the news. If you are a Top Digger, your crap will always be noticed. It is a combination of good diggs and buries, good submissions and good friends, what gets Digg fame. As any politician knows, if you vote for the proper guys, and against the bad ones, and you have many powerful friends, you get to the top. Again, life follows Digg…

    Do box promoters ever fix matches? Do actresses ever sleep with a producer to get a role? Quite likely.

    Do Web Promotion agencies ever force a Digg story to the top, using Black Hat techniques? Also true.

    Black Hat, in SEO terms, means doing what the search engines, or Digg, do not want you to do…

    In both lives, virtual and real, those with a decent budget and a good manager have an edge against the immense competition.

  • Winners of the Innovar Contest 2007

    I wrote an article about the winners of the Innovation contest in Argentina, with images and a brief description of each invention.

    http://www.domaingrower.com/innovar-contest.htm

    Since it was full with the photos I preferred to publish it as a separate page, with tables, in this website.

    I also submitted the article to Digg.com, to see if an original article with quality contents (not mine) could climb to a decent ranking in Digg.

    The poor results confirm that you need a little “push” from paid voters in order to get decent exposure in such a croweded unspecific social network.

  • This edible plant is watered with Sea Water and lambs fed with it are leaner

    This looks like the solution for many sea side communities with scarce drinking water. The plant is called Salicornia, and the experiment of feeding sheep was performed by an Argentine scientist, winning the Innovar prize.

    The lambs had 50% less colesterol when fed with salicornia, pointing to an original, cheap and abundant natural resource.


     

    Project Developer emails:

    cadicush@speedy.com.ar

    cadic@cadic.gov.ar

     Now, I am posting this article here in order to submit it to Digg.com. Since I am sure the news is real, original and innovative, the results should reflect it. Otherwise, I will lose my faith in Digg.com and start favouring other networks. 

     ———

    Spanish version:

    Salicornia: agricultura con agua de mar

    Oscar Alberto Bianciotto

    Desarrolla las posibilidades de cultivo de una especie vegetal halófita nativa de Tierra del Fuego. Regada con agua de mar, tiene potencial nutricional para el hombre y podría conferir características especiales a la carne de ovinos engordados con esta especie. El colesterol se redujo. al 50% en corderos alimentados con pastizales de Salicornia, que resultan más magros para consumo humano.

  • Please bet on this article final Diggs and win…

    Do you know how to Digg this article? It is easy enough: Go to Digg.com, get an account (only need is email) and vote for it. This is the URL:

    Digg here

    The number of Diggs in the first 24 hours is critical for the article positioning in Digg. The most voted articles go to the top, and eventually make it to the front page, gaining lots of visibility.

    However, Digg.com and the other sites using a similar engine, are very hard to tame. Most of the incoming thousand articles per hour get no diggs, and are quickly sent to nowhere land and forgotten.

    The article needs to be very attractive and well written to achieve some readership.

    The positive aspects is that it is FAST. You can climb from non-existance to fame in 10 minutes. And popular, because there are millions of readers that come every day to the site to check the news.

    I have tried in this blog several strategies to seduce the Diggers. Or the Top Diggers, those users with good in-site reputation (sometimes called Karma), and heavy voting power. The Digg-like News Aggregators are non-democratic: some users have valuable votes, while most of them have negligible voting power.

    This article uses bets, a popular way to draw public. Second only to naked girls, which was the subject of my previous post in DomainGrower.com…

    So, you need to bet on How Many Diggs will This Article have 72 hours from now, this is, Saturday December 1st, at 2 PM London time.

    Your votes should be Comments to this article.

    You are not allowed to artificially inflate Diggs.

    The winner will get 3 Digg accounts, at least 1 year old, and 10 Diggs to his/her own story.

  • Why I have 2 accounts in each of these 80 social networks

    I want to be able to test every social network for its promoting power for my stories. Some of them are going to be more receptive than others, depending on its size, difficulty, subject and to the importance they give to old, reliable accounts.

    Social networks give a value to each user, sometimes called ‘karma’, and that value is useful for promotion of stories, either the own user stories or stories from ‘friends’ and strangers.

    I am sticking to 2 accounts per network because it is well known that they detect some features that could point to spam, namely IP. Of course, IP can be defeated by using a navigation proxy, but that needs information, expertise and a potentially self-destructive desire to spam the sites. The second account is used if the first one loses value, or to start polemic discussions that are often followed with more attention.

    I read about a “snowball” effect while promoting stories in the Digg-like sites, started from a minor network, where it should be easier to get noticed, and bringing users/friends/voters to the other sites. It would be useful if the home of your stories included the links pointing to the other social networks where the visitor can vote you. For that, I included a couple of plugins in my WordPress blog.

    Stories are improved by user feedback and testing as they pass thru networks.

    I am starting to test the power of this promotion technique, not too fast because I need my accounts to be mature enough. An account is mature when it had some time and healthy activity in the networks. As in real life networks, you cannot arrive, post your story and expect everyone admire you.

    It is also good if your stories refer to the same subject, and if you develop virtual ‘friends’ that show their trust in you. It is important to complete a profile and include a photo.

    This is the partial list of the networks where I am now. If this story gets enough Diggs, Propellers, Reddits, and so on, I plan to add the age, votes and karma of all the accounts, to help value them.  (more…)

  • I want to get my ideas accross the Web, and make money from them…

    I have been studying the way to communicate my good bizz ideas across the Web, and maybe find a buyer, a partner, an investor or other kind of supporter.
    I have some expertise in SEO, so I can rank my sites quite well in Google and Yahoo. However, there are social networks that are faster and probably more targeted.
    So, I am experimenting with Digg, Meneame and many others.
    It is not easy to get a news promoted by those sites, unless you have a lot of time to spend increasing your karma.
    This is done by reading many news every day and voting the best ones.

    The links that I obtain by publishing in those sites are very helpful for my medium-term efforts of ranking into Google. So, both strategies are concurrent.